Tech Tips: Picking the best streaming music service for your needs

New Wave

The market-research company The NBD Group reported late last year that 96 million people — about 50 percent of the U.S. Internet population aged 13 and older — listened to an Internet radio or on-demand music service in the past three months, according to PCMag.com. Since 2009, CD-listening has fallen by 21 percent.

“CDs are definitely on the way out,” says Jim Huerter of Symmetry the Technology Company in Albany. Huerter specializes in setting up high-performance entertainment systems. “People are using iPods to stream audio throughout the house,” he says. With laptops, MP3 players, regular desktop computers, smartphones and Blu-ray players, you don’t even need to own a CD player anymore to listen to music.

So what’s the best way to do it? A few have emerged as top players. Spotify, Pandora and iTunes are the big three, with sites such as Rdio, Rhapsody and Mog providing nearly identical services, but with smaller, less-substantial catalogs. Here’s what you need to know to make your choice.

Pandora

Famous for its Music Genome Project — an algorithm that determines what kind of music you might like based on how you rate the songs coming through a particular channel — Pandora is simple. You don’t need to download any software, and its music database is gigantic. Type in any artist and Pandora will play you that artist’s song, plus songs by other artists musically related to the one you chose.

Leslie Trosset, a media expert in Albany, likes Pandora because, she says, “a song will pop up in my head and I’ll type it in and, boom, there it is.” The same is true for a certain genre of music; if she’s craving some oldies or some jazz, she plugs in a song and lets the radio take it from there.

Possible downsides: Pandora only allows you to skip six songs per hour if you’re bored or uninterested in what it’s selected for you. You also can’t rewind or repeat songs, or make playlists.

Spotify

Spotify took off when it crossed the pond over to the States. Listeners can search for songs and artists, play whole albums as many times as they like, make playlists and play songs on repeat. And Spotify has its own Pandora-like, radio service for listeners wanting to discover new music or who just want to sit back and let a digital DJ do all the work.

“I use Spotify for a lot of my class playlists,” says Nick Conway, who teaches music at SUNY Albany. Because Spotify is integrated with Facebook, its sharing capabilities are sophisticated and plentiful: Conway makes a playlist for a class and all of his students have immediate access to it, and can share it with their own friends or post it on Facebook or Twitter or on their blogs. Plus, Spotify can be synched on phones and tablets so that you can listen to playlists or albums without being connected to the Internet.

Spotify also allows users to make collaborative playlists. Party-planning friends might all collaborate on the ultimate dinner-party playlist or long-distance pals might introduce each other to new music via a shared playlist. Everyone can have a chance to pick a song.

Possible downside: You have to link your Facebook account to Spotify, so if you’re anti-Facebook or if you’re not interested in sharing your Spotify activity with your Facebook friends, Spotify will elude you. However, once your Facebook and Spotify accounts are connected, you can check your preferences to hide your activity. Also, Spotify’s music database is smaller than Pandora’s and iTunes’. No Beatles. No Led Zeppelin. No Pink Floyd.

iTunes

Cost: free to download, but you have to buy all your music

Once you download an album from iTunes, it’s yours and it’s available on all of your Apple devices, until, supposedly, the end of time. (My harddrive crashed and I lost all my music; iTunes restored everything.) Streaming is possible on any Apple device.

Possible downsides: Buying music can get expensive, plus iTunes can be clunky and requires a lot of updates.